If it’s working correctly, (which while under development, may well not be), this blog should have murky green headings and an awful lot of nothing.  That’s intentional.  I believe in the “not what you include, it’s what you exclude that matters.”

Once it’s been running for a few weeks and I’m happy I’ve gotten rid of every glitch and cross-browser bug etc, I’ll release it on here under a creative commons.  Just for you.

For once I feel that the Internet might be becoming slightly structured!  I’m in preference of XHTML, it’s well structured, it’s unambiguous (assuming people actually validate it, but then there’s absolutely no point in using a language if you’ve not used the correct syntax, nobody releases source code with 20 compile errors in it on the basis that “well, some compiler out there will be able to guess what I meant”), and it’s extensible.

That was it really.  I just thought I’d proclaim my adoration of XML

Blogged with Flock

Goto http://www.plfc.org.uk/ and look at the first link on the page, “FIEC”. Notice (in IE7) that there’s a little gap after it, like there’s a . Well, look at it in FireFox, Opera, Konqueror or Safari and you’ll see a (correctly rendered) image indicating an external link (as used on Wikipedia). Now look (in IE7) on the Missionary Support page and you’ll see what it should look like on the home page. The CSS is completely valid (I set a padding-right and a background-image, it’s the same CSS behind both pages), yet IE7 insists on not displaying the image on the home page. Why? Because it’s full of bugs. Is FireFox? Yes. But they get fixed quickly and regularly. IE7? Every webmaster has to just hack their way around them.

Go, go now and download FireFox.

Update: I just had a look on IE5, and the links render completely wrong. However the home page one does work. Interesting. I then had a look at wikipedia to see how they get around these problems, and I noticed that in IE5 the links don’t render the external icon at all. A quick baz at the source, and I notice they have a bunch of IF statements in the HTML, each one referring various IE versions to alternative CSS “fixes”. Seems a good idea, so I’ll ditto it.

If you’re too lazy to go find the HTML yourself, wikipedia uses this:

 <!--[if lt IE 5.5000]><style type="text/css">@import "/skins-1.5/monobook/IE50Fixes.css?90";</style><![endif]-->
 <!--[if IE 5.5000]><style type="text/css">@import "/skins-1.5/monobook/IE55Fixes.css?90";</style><![endif]-->
 <!--[if IE 6]><style type="text/css">@import "/skins-1.5/monobook/IE60Fixes.css?90";</style><![endif]-->
 <!--[if IE 7]><style type="text/css">@import "/skins-1.5/monobook/IE70Fixes.css?90";</style><![endif]-->
 <!--[if lt IE 7]><script type="text/javascript" src="/skins-1.5/common/IEFixes.js?90"></script>
 <meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" /><![endif]-->

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array ($result));
{
print “nothing”;
print_r ($row);
}

Know what it was? My eyes hurt so much I missed it every time I prodded (over 35 minutes prodding!), that little innocent looking semi-colon on the end of the while() statement. Remove that, and everything works.

Don’t get caught out by this like I did